JSR Farms at Givendale runs a commercial cross-bred suckler herd of 100 cows alongside a pedigree Charolais herd of 110 cows. The Charolais breeding programme is focused on improving the output from the cross-bred herd by using BLUP to select sires with superior genetic merit for production traits. Breeding stock with high EBV’s for growth and carcase traits are selected for re-breeding and attention is also paid to 200 day milk EBV’s and to controlling the level of calving difficulty. Home-bred replacement heifers are selected with Beef Values ranked in the top 10% of the National breed and the stud of reference sires used in the programme have Beef Values in the top 1% of the breed.